


TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US AUTHORS NOTES

by ivorygates



Series: Till Human Voices Wake Us [4]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Meta, Other, The Author Regrets Nothing, Why Do I Post Things Like This?, shameless self indulgence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 03:09:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10527600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: Meta about the writing process of the three stories.  INCLUDES SPOILERS FOR ALL THREE.





	

"Till Human Voices Wake Us" is the same story (the _exact_ same story! Really!) retold three times. One version is slash, one is gen, and one is genderbend. What I wanted to see was how -- and how much -- the gender and sexual orientation of the viewpoint character would change the events of the story, if that's the only thing that's different. If the plot is not about sex, but Daniel's bisexual, will the story play out differently than if he's straight? If it's action/adventure, does it matter if 'Daniel's' a man or a woman? What's going to change?

To set up the pretext for the story I spun an AU off of the episode "Fire and Water" and designed six variations of it. The divergence between the paired universes, and between them and ours, occurs when in one set of universes, SG-1 shakes off the effects of Nem's hypnosis and returns to the planet only to discover that Dr. Jackson is (really most sincerely) dead. In the universes next door, Dr. Jackson survives Oannes, and a few days later sees Earth destroyed by the _Goa'uld_. 

(When I originally sat down to write it -- when it wasn't going to be a triptych -- I intended it to be a story where I killed off everybody but Danielle and Teal'c and then wrote about how the two of them Bonded with each other and eventually became a couple as they turned to each other to survive. But I quickly realized that this wasn't going to work, given where I'd set the story in canon, because Drey'auc was still around and entirely available, and Teal'c and Danielle would just go to The Land of Light and so much for him and Danielle Bonding. So then it ended up being about something else entirely.) 

Though I intended to keep the three versions of the story completely parallel, not only did the different Dr. Jacksons and their life-histories require certain divergences (because I was using the backstory for Danielle I'd established in my other AU), but I found, as I was writing, that the choices that the three of them chose to make (and okay, all subjective here, YMMV, yadda yadda) also drove the story in different directions. To take the most radical example, their several responses to Teal'c's disappearance from the Land of Light.

GenDaniel goes in uniform, armed, with only minimal disguise, and after a brief side-trip, targets the Palace as his first place to search. SlashDaniel goes in disguise and unarmed and chooses to minimize his risk by investigating the Temple before the Palace. Danielle chooses the most complete disguise and a direct bluff; she ends up in the Palace but leaves immediately rather than search it. And I think all these choices are logical, given the variation in character (um, but then I would, wouldn't I?)

GenDaniel is not only closest to Canon Daniel, who (at least as of Season One) doesn't really understand the odds of a situation going into it (and unlike the other two, doesn't really seem to have grasped yet that Earth Is Gone), but has the advantage of a more privileged background. He's a Heterosexual White Male, and even if he is a Geek Intellectual, that's only one strike against him, not two. So in one sense, GenDaniel is a member of a social group that has not had to spend a lot of time learning to focus on outside threats: SlashDaniel is always going to have had to worry about gaybashing, and Danielle has to focus on not being marginalized and even physically threatened because she's a cute little girl. Of the three of them -- a great surprise to me -- GenDaniel is also the most overtly emotional one, which I ascribe to a lack of concern with societal expectations and potential reprisals.

SlashDaniel is also more cautious in his approach to the Chulak situation not only because of his superior awareness of the possibility of physical threat, but because he's still pretty stunned at losing Jack, especially considering that he's got that huge unanswered question obsessing him. His first instinct is to sneak into the situation in the fashion most likely to allow him to see without being seen, to function as a pure observer. Interestingly, SlashDaniel is also the only one of the three to immediately adopt native dress in the Land of Light.

Danielle, of the three of them, is the one who resorts most naturally to bluff and misdirection. Though rescuing Teal'c is a very high priority for her, as she identifies him as the last surviving member of her family, she is the one who delays longest, consults the most other people, and involves the most outsiders in her rescue attempt in an effort to ensure the best odds of success. Despite this, she is also the one who chooses a direct approach that will bring her into contact with the hostile citizenry of Chulak.

Another thing that interested me when I started writing, was that while I could start Danielle and GenDaniel's stories at precisely the same place, I had to start SlashDaniel's story somewhere else entirely because of the slash element.

It is practically a requirement of slash that the characters' sexual history be brought forward to serve as a context for the action, almost serving as an additional character. Especially in the cases of Jack and Daniel, who both have heterosexual liaisons in canon, the writer must acknowledge this past and determine her (and therefore their) response to the previous women in their lives (and in Daniel's case, since this story is set in Season One, the possibility of a future relationship with Sha're) as well as to each other in order to determine the course of the story. Since the possibility of a romantic relationship between Jack and Daniel is one of the driving forces of the action, instead of the resolution of the story, Daniel's sexuality -- and Jack's response to it -- had to be one of the first elements I brought on-stage. If the reader doesn't immediately know that Daniel's bisexual, and if Daniel doesn't know that Something's Going On with Jack before the action of the story proper begins, the story just isn't going to be a fully-integrated slash narrative.

I really sort of wrote SlashDaniel's and GenDaniel's stories to see what the difference would be between a slash and gen action narrative (both of them are spun off of Danielle's story, which was written first), and it became clear to me while I was writing that for me there were some interesting cognitive differences between GenDaniel and SlashDaniel, and one of them was in their emotional connection to Sam.

When I started writing, I discovered that SlashDaniel was really kind of in love with Sam in a way I find very hard to describe. He feels protective of her in a way that stems from them both being members of an outsider culture, and worries about her being hurt emotionally by events such as implicit responsibility for Jack O'Neill's death. I think to some extent he knows that he can never quite be 'one of the guys,' (not without lying to an extent which is abhorrent to his nature) so he responds to the same quality of never-guyness in Sam. But though I saw a strong implicit and unlikely-to-be-consummated attraction between SlashDaniel and Sam, I found it to be completely absent from the GenDaniel/Sam dynamic. I think it's possible that GenDaniel has something of an additional layer of blinders on, simply because a 'conventional' relationship with Sam is more possible for him -- possibly even expected of him -- and because he's more hung up on Sha're, and in a different way, than SlashDaniel is, given that SlashDaniel is contemplating an additional romantic attachment and GenDaniel isn't. It's possible that GenDaniel, reading Sam as a fellow outsider in a different way than SlashDaniel does (though they're both picking up on her 'outsider' vibe), is doing her the courtesy of giving her the gift that she most wants: treating her as if she really is 'one of the guys.' So it seems to me more as if GenDaniel is going to see Sam as his equal and, in many ways, his equivalent, and simply not get into a male/female gender dynamic with her, but instead respond to her emotionally in more of a straightforward non-gender-subtexted friendship. So, at least for the terms of this story, GenDaniel thinks of Sam as his bulwark against Jack's more conventionally military mind-set and his co-conspirator on behalf of Science; someone to talk to who understands him and is interested in the same things he is. If she isn't along on a mission, he misses her presence. If she were male, his emotional responses to her would be just about the same.

The way GenDaniel thinks of Jack -- without the sexual undercurrent the other two share -- is interesting, too. He loves Jack as his best friend, and admires him intensely because he recognizes that Jack is good at what Jack does, but there's a whole different kind of tension there, a kind of psychic arm-wrestling for the dominant position that's absent from Jack and SlashDaniel's interaction.

Meanwhile, even though there's the textual 'baggage' of an implied romance to code for the reader into the Jack/Danielle story, there's no need to start it at a different place than the gen story, and in fact, the Danielle story is the shortest of the three. Even though it is as much of a love story as Jack and SlashDaniel's is, because of the implications of canon (unless we're explicitly told otherwise, we believe Jack to be straight) and the simplicity of narrative (I say 'she', you know I'm talking about a woman, and the presumption is of heterosexuality, like it or not), the fact that Danielle is in love with Jack is something that can be brought on-stage more easily over the course of the narrative. In one sense, the entire 20th century has preconditioned the reader to expect a romantic pairing under almost any conceivable circumstances that a man and woman are together, and for that reason, Danielle's story requires far less set-up, and far fewer textual cues, to explain or suggest a heterosexual romantic pairing.

Dramatically speaking, of course, Danielle is also the only one of the three who "has" to die, because it's the only "happy" ending possible for her. Given the depth of the emotional and romantic bond between her and Jack that is both stated and implied, the reader forms the expectation that she'll never be happy in the universe where Jack is alive -- both of them know that they're in love with two other people and will never forget that for an instant -- nor is there any real possibility of her succeeding in destroying the _Goa'uld_ in her own universe. Of the three of them, she is also the only one who is actually seeking revenge as opposed to attempting to foment a more broad-based rebellion.

Meanwhile, both GenDaniel and SlashDaniel survive the battle against Apophis in Earth's Solar System in much the way they do in canon. And one chooses to remain in the Alternate Universe, and one chooses to go back to his own.

GenDaniel's strongest motivator throughout the action is Getting Sha're Back and Liberating Abydos, since he has no romantic distractions either to tie him to the Alternate Universe or to present him with the additional level of bereavement that the other two experience -- though his grief at the loss of his friend is true and profound -- and his strongest secondary motivator (as we have seen in canon) is to protect the people of Abydos in his own universe. It is not inconsistent with Daniel as of Season One that he would choose to assume this task. I found in writing him that his emotional landscape was an interesting blend of Dani's motivations and SlashDaniel's in terms of other strategies and goals. He's team-identified as Danielle is (though SlashDaniel focuses more on his relationships with individual team members in interior monologue) and pacifistic as SlashDaniel is, though more inclined to rely on weapons as a backup strategy than SlashDaniel seems to be. 

SlashDaniel, on the other hand, is poised emotionally even before his transition to the new universe to settle and reintegrate into a new life. His primary goal is not to start a rebellion to free Abydos (which he assumes, rightly or wrongly, to already be under _Goa'uld_ control) but to seek knowledge to fight the _Goa'uld_ on a broader stage. He's willing to settle into a new universe for a number of reasons, the most important of which is, of course, that the man he loves has returned from the dead -- in a sense -- and is emotionally-available to him. But he has also had a clear indication (in the time he was wandering around between Chulak and P3R-233) that his skills and training can be put to far more efficient use in this universe than they could in one where he is the sole survivor of the _Tau'ri_. Here, there is much more likelihood that he will be able to save 'a' Sha're (if not his original Sha're) and contribute substantially to the defeat of the _Goa'uld_. SlashDaniel chooses not only to remain in a world that seems most familiar to him, and in which he is accepted, but to use his skills to procure safety for the greatest number, by working to ensure the survival of a surviving Earth.

As for the difference in time between the two universes -- six weeks to two months in one universe versus three months in the other -- "Ripple Effect" suggests that while there is a fairly close temporal correspondence between transfer points in the Quantum Mirror, it isn’t in fact absolute, and there can be a slippage of up to several months between universes. FWIW, I think that the events of "Fire and Water" and "There But For The Grace Of God" are actually likely to have occurred approximately about three months apart in canon.

So that's my take. Three 'Daniels.' Six universes. One story.

#


End file.
